go into a common stock, than that they should redound to the exclusive benefit of the importing States. But it is not so generally true, as to render it equitable, that those duties should form the only National fund. When they are paid by the merchant, they operate as an additional tax upon the importing State, whose citizens pay their proportion of them in the character of consumers. In this view, they are productive of inequality among the States; which inequality would be increased with the increased extent of the duties. The confinement of the National revenues to this species of imposts would be attended with inequality, from a different cause, between the manufacturing and the non-manufacturing States. The States which can go farthest towards the supply of their own wants, by their own manufactures, will not, according to their numbers or wealth, consume so great a proportion of imported articles as those States which are not in the same favorable situation. They would not, therefore, in this mode alone contribute to the public treasury in a ratio to their abilities. To make them do this, it is necessary that recourse be had to excises; the proper objects of which are particular kinds of manufactures. New York is more deeply interested in these considerations, than such of her citizens as contend for limiting the power of the Union to external taxation, may be aware of. New York is an importing State, and is not likely speedily to be, to any great extent, a manufacturing State. She would of course suffer in a double light, from restraining the jurisdiction of the Union to commercial imposts.
So far as these observations tend to inculcate a danger of the import duties being extended to an injurious extreme, it may be observed, conformably to a remark made in another part of these papers, that the interest of the revenue itself would be a sufficient guard against
